SOYO KT333 Dragon Ultra Motherboard
The board comes in a similar packaging that was offered with the SOYO Dragon Ultra -SIS 645 Mainboard. The packaging of the board has been very well done, with a cool dragon logo right in front. I love these newly designed boxes with carry handles in them, it’s so convenient when transporting them. Opening up the box you’re offered the standard SOYO lineup of accessories. The number of accessories they offer is still unbeatable by any other motherboard manufactures standards. SOYO sure have come a long way from their days as a small OEM manufacture and it’s great to see them doing so well. So what’s on offer? Well other than the board and the manuals you get the following;
- One 8 in 1 Bonus Pack CD containing norton anti virus 2002 and a few more handy utilities.
- 4 IDE cables, one of which is a Floppy drive able.
- 1 Audio Expansion Card, which also comes with fiber optic in/out ports.
- 1 Heat-Sink paste sachet
- 1 SB-P4SX E-Box, which includes 4 USB ports. Apart from the motherboard the E-box is one of the best accessories I have seen for a long time.
So there you have it folks, the total lineup. There is currently no other competitor who offers anything as decent as the above lineup of accessories with a new board.
The BIOS
The KT333 Dragon plus uses a Award PCI 2MB BIOS. The bios allows many tweaking options such as CPU frequency adjustments in 1MHz increments, CPU ratio slections from 6.0x – 14.0x, CPU voltage adjustments, DDR Vcore adjustments and AGP voltage adjustments. If you do not want to mess around with these settings, there’s a system Performance menu which allows you to choose between Normal, fast and turbo modes, which changes the BIOS settings to it’s optimal level depending on what mode you choose.
The Board
The KT333 ultra is pretty much reminiscent of the KT266A Dragon plus. The board has been incorporated with a black PCB as with the K7V dragon plus. By the first looks of the board, it looks very promising. Everything has been well spaced out so that no problems arise during installation. The CPU socket is surrounded by 9 capacitors, however this does not provide any kind of restriction in installing a big heatsink. This time round, SOYO has decided to go with a active cooling fan for their north bridge, which will undoubtedly produce more stable results during overclocking.
Below the 5 purple PCI slots are the two 2.0 compliant USB headers (the two green headers) which are used to connect the E-box. USB 2.0 supposedly provides a 40% increase in transfer speeds from USB 1.1 standard. What’s more, the board also includes the USB 1.1 headers to the left of these headers, which provide a total of 6USB ports for this board. It’s just great to have this amount of expandability on one single board.
The board consists of 3 DIMM sockets which provide expandability up to 3GB of DDR memory. Right on top of the PCI slot is the 4X AGP Pro slot, and the power connector you see next to it is for AGP Pro.
The KT333 Dragon ultra consists of 4 IDE ports and one floppy drive port. The two yellow IDE ports are for the RAID feature provided by the Highpoint HPT372 RAID controller. The board also supports ATA 133 as a standard feature. Even though ATA 133 does not offer that much of a performance boost to ATA 100, it’s still great if you have a ATA 133 supporting hard drive.
On-board audio is provided by the ever popular C-Media 8738 audio chip, which provides 6-channel audio as well. We have said time and time again that the C-Media audio chip provides excellent sound quality, and as a result, unless you’re really into sound, don’t bother going for a creative sound card. I’m sure it’s in par with the SB live, and that’s good enough by many standards. Furthermore if you attach the audio expansion card provided you’re able to experience 6-channel audio. That’s just an awesome combination of a very low price.
The dragon ultra also has an on-board Realtek 8100 Ethernet Controller, which provides 10/100 LAN connectivity. This is yet another cost effective chip that does its job without any glitches at all.
